Wiktionary:Wikisaurus

This is the main project page of Wikisaurus, a Wiktionary subproject and a wiki namespace aiming at creating a thesaurus, a dictionary of synonyms, antonyms and further semantically related terms such as hyponyms, hypernyms, meronyms and holonyms.

The purpose of Wikisaurus is to serve the role of an electronic thesaurus—a dictionary of synonyms, near-synonyms and antonyms, and near-antonyms, but also of other semantically related terms such as hyponyms, hypernyms, meronyms, holonyms.

The purpose of such a thesaurus in general is mainly to help anyone who writes for living or fun—writers, managers, contributors to wikis, bloggers, and writers of love letters—to find words they don't recall or even know when they recall words that are semantically related to the sought word. In general, anyone to whom the choice of words matters can benefit from a thesaurus, especially one linked to a dictionary providing the definitions.

Added value of Wikisaurus is its Wiktionary integration—it links to and is linked from Wiktionary.

Whether Wikisaurus at en.wiktionary.org should contain entries for other languages than English was disputed. Entries for foreign languages could look like Wikisaurus:příbuzný and Wikisaurus:juoppo. An alternative naming of the entries is "Wikisaurus:cs:příbuzný" and "Wikisaurus:fi:juoppo", in part modeled on the naming of topic categories. Yet another alternative is "Wikisaurus:cs:relative" and "Wikisaurus:fi:drunkard" using English headwords prefixed by the language.

Place "* See also [[Wikisaurus:headword]]" to "Synonyms" section, or to "Hyponyms" section if the Wikisaurus entry contains mainly hyponyms.

Especially for Wikisaurus entries featuring mostly synonyms, it is good to add a link to the Wikisaurus entry from all the mainspace entries for the synonyms, so that the user knows that there is a Wikisaurus entry when visiting the mainspace.

/Format - Discussion about the formatting and general contents of a Wikisaurus entry.

/Requested entries - A lot of words with candidate lists of synonyms that can be used as a starting point for creation of entries. The size of the page: 700 words. --Dan Polansky 11:34, 5 September 2008 (UTC)